Nothing Left To Want (18 page)

I waited for Milan to say something cutting. When she instead told me that I looked ahhdorable, I felt even worse. Her kindness let me know that she felt too sorry for me to tell me what she thought. I sulked all the way to the club and listened silently while she talked about the other girls who would be meeting us there.

Milan had a rotating entourage by then. Christy and I weren’t part of it, we were her 'family', as she would remind us reassuringly if we showed signs of jealousy or insecurity. The other girls, who she allowed in and then banished at will, were just 'interesting'.

I was only half-listening while she chattered away about the two new girls I would meet that night. “You’ll have fun, Care Bears. These are L.A. girls. They’re funny, like teamsters in dresses, bad dresses too.” I flushed and she caught it. She leaned over and kissed my temple. “Oh, let it go. You couldn’t be anything but totally adorable if you tried. Gawd, you are so insecure all the time. Carey … ” She began ticking off points on her long fingers. Her fingernails, I noted, were painted black and I curled my own childishly pink painted ones into fists. “ …. you are beautiful, you look like a perfect doll all the time, you are Carey Kelleher, and that tends to count, and, besides,” she giggled, “yeah, that dress is a total mess, but it’s a Chanel mess, so who cares? Are you going to pout all night long, 'cause, Care Bear, then you really will look like a psycho baby-doll.”

We both started to laugh, and for once I think I looked as happy and at home as she did when we strode past the half mile long line of people waiting outside for a nod from the doorman, a nod that in most cases would never come.

Inside, I got separated from Milan for a minute by three photographers all simultaneously begging her for a smile. She was there for work, so she worked it, flashing them her signature smile and head tilt, and showing off her dress. I began making my way towards the booths, looking for Christy, when a hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. I would have pulled away but then I looked at who was pulling and didn’t move a muscle.

Michael is six feet two inches and brawny in a town of skinny lounge lizard boys. He has very olive skin and about ten pounds of thick dark brown hair that always looks like he just got out of bed. It’s a hot look by any standard and his hair always hangs down into his smoky even dark blue eyes, and I’m sure - no, I know - that I am only one of thousands of girls who loved brushing it back. Michael is such a smart boy.

He grinned down at me, way down, despite my stupid white five inch boots. “I heard you let a friend of mine take off your little party dress.”

I was horror-stricken. I had only been with two guys up at Brown. How had that reached all of New York, and why did he, the most perfect looking boy in the world, have to have heard about it? Always bad under fire, I answered stupidly. “What? What did you say?”

He leaned forward, moving right into my personal space, and thank God for wonderful overcrowded New York nights, I couldn’t back away. His breath smelled like cinnamon and vodka. He grinned lazily at me and by that time I was already dying to know his first name so that I could call the imaginary son I would give him by it later when I was alone. “Hey, I was just kidding. It’s the line from a song.”

“
What song? I’ve never heard a song with that line.”

He shrugged. “It’s old. I dig old school music.” He smiled. “Anyway, it’s all that plays on my dad’s plane, so I didn’t have any choice. It’s a song by this guy Elvis Costello, I think it’s called 'Alison', but it reminds me of you, whose name is … ?”

“
Carey ... uh ... Carolyn, well, no, I mean everybody calls me Carey ... I’m ... uh ... I’m here with Milan.”

“
Milan? The city?”

He was good. I really thought he didn’t know, and throwing in his dad’s plane casually, that was clever too.

“
Yeah, she’s … oh well, who cares? I’m here with some girlfriends and I still don’t know your name. Gawd, I hope it’s not Elvis.”

He laughed. “No, fraid not. I’m Michael, well, no, I mean everybody calls me Mike. Uh, I’m here by myself.”

“
Are you making fun of me? You tell me some random rude song line and now you’re ... ”

He put his finger on the side of my face. “Fuck no, I’m not making fun of you. Have you looked in a mirror? I saw you, I thought 'Jesus, Mike, you gotta catch that one before every other idiot in the place swarms her'.”

“
Oh.”

His finger pushed lightly against my face. “Smile. I want to see it. I can tell it’s a good one.”

“
Good what?” I asked him stupidly.

He laughed again. I didn’t mind that time; at least he thought I was funny. “A good dimple. Show it to me.”

I did and he whistled. Without asking me, he leaned forward and put the tip of his tongue against my dimple. I shivered, swaying towards him. He leaned back, leaving me bereft. “I could put a quarter in there. God, you are like a perfect little doll, and I want you to let me take off your party dress, ‘Carolyn, everybody calls you Carey’.”

Lucky for me, I heard Christy’s voice calling me over to the booth because I would have let him, right there, right then. Instead I muttered some unintelligent remark about my friends waiting and I think I went so far as to say 'Nice meeting you'.

Christy and Milan were giggling at the look on my face but I could tell they both definitely approved of the way he looked and, for once, I was the center of attention.

The two L.A. girls were a kind of social hit and miss. One of them was really pretty. She looked kind of like a Botticelli angel in the extra-long variety. Her name was Lyric, typical L.A. goofy name, and she veered back and forth from kind of thuggy to New Age hippy, but mostly she was sweet and I liked her. The other girl acted like a wannabe Mike Tyson, fuck this and fuck that and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was fairly hideous, with a really severe receding chin situation and huge nose, and she was wearing leather which no one did.

Her name was Karmen, which sums up a lot about what is wrong with L.A., and after her fourth eye-rolling remark about all the bitches and hos that she liked to fuck up in L.A., I leaned over and whispered to Christy, “Gawd, who is she and why is she at our table?”

Christy rolled her eyes in agreement. “I know, isn’t she the worst? Milan told me her dad owns like the internet or something, but I could care, right? Don’t worry; I don’t think we’ll be seeing her again. Milan said she is out here for a week to try and do outpatient rehab. She knows a friend-of-a-friend kind of deal, just ignore her. Now you tell me who the ahhmazing looking guy is who’s been staring at you all night?”

I squirmed in pleasure. “Oh my God, is he really staring?”

“
Like, uh, yeah. Do you know him?”

“
I just met him. His name is Michael. He said I remind him of some ahhmazing love song and he licked my dimple.”

Christy gasped in admiration and I looked for him. He was standing about a foot away, just watching me. After a while he came over, nodded at Milan and Christy, and asked me to dance.

I said yes, but we didn’t dance. We walked outside into the cold night and kept walking for a few blocks until we got to his apartment. He didn’t live in a doorman building and the elevator was broken. I followed him up the kind of dirty metal stairs. All I could hear were my heels clanging on the steps and my heart pounding in my ears. When we got inside, he didn’t offer me a drink or anything, he just reached for me and I let him take off my party dress.

Chapter 19

In retrospect, which is the only 'spect' I’ve got right now, I maybe could have seen the writing on the wall as far as the future of my relationship. But when you are in love, really in love, you only see the world in two colors, black and blue: navy blue for the color of Michael’s eyes, paler blue for the sky that always seems clear - and azure on the good days - blue for the ocean of hope and promise that your world holds; black for the days he didn’t call and black for the pit of fear of the very idea that he didn’t love me as much as I loved him.

And how could he have? He was eighteen too, and not my kind of eighteen, not a needy, insecure, self-hating mess who was ready to cling so hard to the first person who let me love them that I might drag us both down into more black … the black murky waters of obsession.

The morning after our first night together, he was sweet and cute, and a little shy, and I was happy. Saying I was happy maybe doesn’t get it. A different girl would say she was in heaven, walking on air, blah blah blah. I was walking the hard pavement of New York in a wrinkled white lace Chanel dress and heels, but unlike some other mornings, it didn’t feel like the walk of shame. I didn’t feel giddy but I didn’t feel hungover and ashamed either. It might have been the first morning in my whole life that I noticed how truly blue the Manhattan sky was. Just looking upward, looking ahead was a huge deal for me.

I did feel happy and, if you have never really been happy, that word is plenty huge enough without laying on a bunch of excess sap for effect.

The first thing I did when I got home, after apologizing to Petal and leaving a note for my maid to call in the carpet cleaners, was to sit down at the computer and Google the song he had said I reminded him of - Elvis Costello, 'Alison'.

The lines 'Alison, I know this world is killing you' and 'Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say' fired straight back at me.
That is what I meant by signs and portents, but a girl in love will tell herself all kinds of things. In my case I told myself that he didn’t really know the words and that, even if he had, he couldn’t have seen that much truth about me so quick. But I never did tell Christy, after all, what love song he had said I reminded him of. I told her I had forgotten, as if I could have.

I also told myself that, even for a guy who wasn’t a needy emotional mess, eighteen was plenty old enough to recognize the girl of your dreams and want to settle down.

All I had to do, I told myself, was find out exactly what Michael’s idea of the perfect girl was, and be her. If there is a single girl or woman in the world who says she hasn’t done the same thing, all I can say to that is, oh my God, wake up and get real.

The whole ‘how to be perfect’ thing is a slippery slope with guys, though, because you can’t ask them what they want you to be; that will send them running away at hyper-speed. You are supposed to know these things, but I didn’t, I still don’t. I knew who did though, so I went to the source to which all male admiration flowed.

Milan was living in her own apartment by then. She had gotten Christy a different place. After all, she didn’t want her little sister stalked by her own twenty-four seven paparazzi entourage.

Their parents had finally settled down in some oversized palace out in Beverly Hills. I don’t know if Grandpa Marin paid for it, to get Sonny Boy to settle down, or if Milan had helped finance it. She never talked about money or sex, so I never knew if she had a lot or a little of either of them.

Her apartment in the Trump Towers was small, and nice by most standards. Mine weren’t most standards and I thought at best it looked like a decent small hotel suite. The place was always a mess because she had, at any given time, fifty dresses lying out, mostly ones designers sent over, hoping she would showcase them. Add that to two or three hundred shoes lying around, none of them matching, a Chihuahua, two kittens and a white lop-eared bunny, which she had dyed pink, and it was a crazy apartment. She was only an eighteen year old girl too, not that anyone besides Christy and me ever remembered that.

I hadn’t even showered before running over there because I didn’t want to wash the smell of Michael off of me.

I just threw on jeans and a sweatshirt, put Petal into her carrier and called for a car to take me over to her. It was only ten in the morning, so I knew she would be home. When the doorman buzzed me up, she was waiting at the door, wearing panties and nothing else, and naturally looking like she was ready for the cover of Esquire.

We went back to her closet of a bedroom and lay down on the bed. Petal and her Chihuahua Wendy were bffs too, and started right in on the kittens, so we had to shout at each other to hear ourselves. I cuddled Captain Hook, the pink rabbit, and told her I was in love, he was the one, the only one I had been waiting for my whole life. I would die if I couldn’t get him to feel the same way, and I would die if we didn’t get married, and I really didn’t want to die at all anymore. Since last night I thought I might want to live forever and didn’t she think he was the most gorgeous, intense looking guy she had ever seen, and did she think he felt the same way about me, and what did I have to do to make him feel the same?

Then I started to cry.